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Family Day. I can never quite get over the name of this Ontario statutory holiday.

It is part summons — thou shalt spend this day with thy family. It is part wish — may your family just have fun together on this day off, or at least be less stressed. It is part blessing — it’s wonderful, important, and very hard work to raise a family, so be proud of your daily devotion and commitment.

And it’s all “Premier Dad,” who established this holiday, now in its sixth year, as a “powerful recognition of our priorities,” and who last week exited after 16 years as Liberal party leader and nine as premier. Presumably he’s going off to spend more time with his family.

It was McGuinty’s background that shaped his unabashed view of the significance of family life. He grew up in Ottawa, the first-born son of 10 children, and eventually followed in his larger than life father’s footsteps to a career as an MPP.

For Dalton McGuinty, family was not only a built-in campaign team, it was a passel of brothers and sisters whose lives and problems he knew intimately.

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Now, along with his lively wife, Terri, and four grown children, McGuinty, not yet 60, gets to start a new chapter in the book of Dalton.

And although he accepted the Premier Dad nickname with grace, I never thought he should have. It made him out to be a scold and a nanny rather than a serious, powerful leader who could authentically focus on and speak intimately of the smaller ways family life and the welfare of children, even down to their school snacks, could be improved.

It trivialized one of his greatest strengths — his totemic belief in the power of family to hold you together, to help you succeed, to provide, as the late American historian Christopher Lasch once called it, “a haven in a heartless world.”

So please, let’s not call Kathleen Wynne, who brings with her an updated version of family life — a woman to whom she is married, children, grandchildren — “Premier Mom.”

It would be a big mistake to label Ontario’s first female premier that way simply because she thinks government can help families. Or because she declares with firmness: “I want those extracurriculars back.” Or even because she meddles. All governments meddle.

Politicians pay a lot of lip service to “family” life. But they seldom get it right. They go along with portraying their own seemingly picture-perfect families in glossy campaign brochures, they strategically use harrowing events in their private lives, including death, illness or a kid in trouble, if they calculate it will resonate with voters, they maunder on about how much they care about your family.

But most of the time this family pandering doesn’t connect with what’s really happening in most households on a busy weekday, as kids and parents shout at the top of their lungs when a boot goes missing or a packed lunch is spurned, and dread the day in the pits of their stomachs because homework isn’t done or a work deadline is crushing down. They survive it anyway, all for the privilege of tiredly coming home and trying again to get it right the next day.

Ironically, it was one of the world’s most powerful and shining political couples who at first let some light shine on the ordinary dissatisfactions of family life.

In his bestselling pre-presidential memoirs, Dreams From My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, U.S. President Barack Obama alluded to how much his own ambitions had destabilized his marriage. Plainly put, Michelle was plenty mad at him for seldom being there.

And Michelle Obama, before the image polishers got to her, tossed off lines about her husband’s morning breath and inattention to domestic detail.

Now the Obamas, burnished and buffed, along with their growing daughters, are held up to be the perfect exquisite American family.

The funny thing is that underneath, they are a great family, just not close to perfect. There is no such thing.

A perfect family outing may be possible, but even that might be asking a lot of our human nature.

Still, it’s a good day to try for one. Even if you’re a politician. Make that especially if you’re a politician.

Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson

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